The amazing collaborative force of the internet

Volapük is one of the many attempts of making a universal, easy to learn language. It was created by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879-1880. And abandoned in the early 1900’s. According to Wikipedia there are now an estimated 20-30 Volapük speakers in the world. If that’s correct, this is pretty amazing:

Yes. Seems like they’re something between 500 and 1000 contributors. Still pretty amazing that they have more than 100 000 articles in their Wikipedia. Sweden, and their 8 mill people have less than 300 000 articles, and our own “new norwegian” – a language that should be more active than Volapük has only 40 000 entries.

I’m confident that the production of all those Wiki articles in Volapuk was the work of fewer than ten people. I get the impression that they were produced by using some sort of device.

As an active speaker of Esperanto for forty years, I know my way around the movement for an international language, and there are not more than 20 – 30 Volapukists around. Many of them know Esperanto too!